Science

Last year, a child born with HIV was revealed to be "functionally cured" thanks to the administration of a liquid antiretroviral almost immediately following her birth. Unfortunately, the National Institutes of Health have just announced that the so-called "Mississippi Baby" is now showing detectable levels of the HIV virus some two years after she was taken off of the drug regimen with no detectible levels of the virus.

In the summer of 2010, Ryan Clark twisted his ankle during a gym class. It was painful, but inconvenient more than anything. He was put on crutches for a week and his ankle healed. Then, six weeks later, the pain returned—only this time, it was a lot worse. Ryan ended up in a wheelchair, unable to bear the agony of walking. Drugs and rehab helped and after six weeks or so he recovered. Then he injured himself again, and a third time, each minor accident triggering pain that became horrendous.

Tony Zador is a professor of biology at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who studies auditory processing, attention and decision-making in rodents.

He spoke recently at the laboratory’s 79th annual symposium on quantitative biology, which focused this year on the topic of cognition. Zador talked about his recent work trying to demonstrate how brain circuits might be mapped by using techniques for sequencing genes. I talked to Zador at the conference and an edited transcript follows—or you can watch the whole interview here.